GeekNights Monday - Apple vs the FBI

MrPeriod

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider the issues around Apple's stand against the FBI, the dangers of crypto backdoors, etc... In the news, the machine learning revolution continues by mining social media to source food poisoning outbreaks more effectively than traditional inspections. This breakthrough joins the final end of human input into the game of Go, one of many advances in what appears to be an accelerating field. Google technically complies (the best kind of compliance) with Europe's ridiculous data censorship rules.

One of our newest lectures - Designing Game Rules - is finally on youtube!

• Bad doors are everywhere
• Cyclist chased by an ostrich

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Andrew

Deep Learning - This shit works and we have no idea why. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Coldguy

I am linking it here again since it is relevant, but another good summery for non technical people about what apple is doing.

Dazzle369

You need that Nvidia Quadro action to speed up renders, only problem is that they're not built for games.

Pegu

@Rym the i7-920 isn't the best i7. It's literally the worst of the generation. The best was the 980 which cost like $1000.

sK0pe

Wait who thinks Apple was in the wrong in this case?
All they are doing is the obvious thing that a big company would do in the same situation but are using it for marketing and advertising because the FBI were silly enough to think it would be cool to go public with the request.

My fans weren't spinning.

Your case didn't fail, your fans failed lol. Just buy some Noctua's they are super quiet and have like a 6 year warrany, they may seem expensive but I've yet to replace a case or heatsink fan.
Also clean out your case maybe 2 times a year f you have a high flow case without any dust filters .

Pegu said:

@Rym the i7-920 isn't the best i7. It's literally the worst of the generation. The best was the 980 which cost like $1000.

The nehalem's were literally all the same silicon, especially the first few batches, with different lock downs. I overclocked my 930 (released when i7-920's ran out of stock) to 4.2ghz (faster than the 980 clock for 1/3 of the cost).
The 920 was the best of that generation if you knew how to do the most basic hardware overclock.

I literally only swapped the CPU out a few weeks ago because my CPU became unstable at the overclock and would only reliably work at 3.2 ghz (base clock). My Graphics card and SSD were being choked due to the CPU.

I was still on 6gb of RAM.

Upgrading RAM to DDR4 (16gb), a new motherboard and CPU, literally increased all my CPU capped processes by factors of 2 - 3. CPU capped games now run at 600 frames per second as an example.

Pegu

Fair enough. Also, The case did fail in the sense of the front input.

sK0pe

Pegu said:

Fair enough. Also, The case did fail in the sense of the front input.

That's true, forgot about that anecdote.

okeefe

sK0pe said:

Wait who thinks Apple was in the wrong in this case?
All they are doing is the obvious thing that a big company would do in the same situation but are using it for marketing and advertising because the FBI were silly enough to think it would be cool to go public with the request.

The court of popular opinion initially was not on Apple's side. Have there been ads? The “marketing” seems limited to letters to the public, but honestly it feels like anyone who goes looking for those already knows about the issues, cares, and is probably on Apple's side to begin with.

Rym

Scott just sent me a link to how you can watch the AI finally crush the aspirations of man live.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/8/11179176/google-deepmind-go-challenge-live-stream-time-how-to-watch

Dazzle369

sK0pe said:

The 920 was the best of that generation if you knew how to do the most basic hardware overclock.

I literally only swapped the CPU out a few weeks ago because my CPU became unstable at the overclock and would only reliably work at 3.2 ghz (base clock). My Graphics card and SSD were being choked due to the CPU.

I was still on 6gb of RAM.

Upgrading RAM to DDR4 (16gb), a new motherboard and CPU, literally increased all my CPU capped processes by factors of 2 - 3. CPU capped games now run at 600 frames per second as an example.

I think the primary bottlenecks have been CPU/ GPU. Mostly the CPU. For GPU, I need more CUDA cores and graphical RAM.

For the CPU, faster cores only help so much. Having more of them is the way to go.

If you're infinitely wealthy you could just build a giant render farm on a rack and not need to upgrade ever.

Eventually, I plan to build a dual CPU workstation for all things work related. For the gaming rig, my 2011 just needs a new GPU. Still rocking a punkass 460. I've already seen what a 970 can do and I'm salivating.

ninjarabbi

If you're willing to to get creative, you can build a pretty nice multi-cpu workstation out of used server hardware for pretty cheap.

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee)

First Go game is tonight!

Rym

The 920 was not technically the highest end chip, since you could get the higher-clocked or otherwise variant options. Same is true today: there is a top normal chip, and then there's the "extreme" or whatever option with much higher cost but only incremental improvement.

So I didn't buy the top of the top: I bought the top of the price/performance curve just ahead of massively diminishing returns per dollar spent. ;^)

okeefe

I'm certain somewhere, perhaps deep in the FBI, they have techies who know what they're doing. Maybe they didn't get a shot at this particular case. Or…

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but I think it's reasonably likely that the FBI put the county officials up to reset the Apple ID password on purpose to force this particular case simply because it's the best public-facing argument the FBI has seen until now. Apple is preventing the FBI from cracking a dead terrorist's iPhone? Only privacy advocates, crypto enthusiasts, or techies could possibly give a shit. It just looks bad for Apple, which is why the FBI made this a public request.

One relatively simple update Apple needs to do is have the user unlock the iOS when doing an upgrade. I guarantee that will happen ASAP, possibly with iOS 9.3. I'd be doubly impressed if Apple released an iOS 7 update that included this feature—I don't think they've ever released an update for an outdated iOS, and it'd be a double fuck-you to the FBI to do so.

Starfox

okeefe said:

One relatively simple update Apple needs to do is have the user unlock the iOS when doing an upgrade.

Isn't this already the case for iOS > n?

no fun girl

I am enjoying watching this analysis of the Fan Hui games. I especially like how difficult it is to resist an anthropomorphic interpretation of the game play. It has a "Japanese" "female" play style, likely because it hasn't played/observed enough diversity of games to shed the pattern mimicry it gained from the sample games. It "doesn't understand" the strategic value of various positions, but those positions are a very human method of learning. My (mostly ignorant) impression is that machines behave in a very alien way when designed to achieve an end goal, being unhindered by the various frameworks humans use as mental shortcuts (unless, of course, the goal itself is having a human-like process). I've heard that modern human chess has evolved to more resemble computer style play..

okeefe

Starfox said:

okeefe said:

One relatively simple update Apple needs to do is have the user unlock the iOS [device] when doing an upgrade.

Isn't this already the case for iOS > n?

If it were already the case, then the request for GovtOS would be useless because there would be no way to apply it. As I understand it, there's a recovery mode that allows any signed update.

Apreche

Someone else suggested the same method I suggested on the show. Just take out the flash memory chip.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/one-fbis-major-claims-iphone-case-fraudulent

The thing is, their suggestion doesn't go far enough. Just copy all the data in all the phone's storage onto a desktop Mac. Then you can try to decrypt those bits directly, or even use the iOS emulator in XCode. You don't need the phone.

Rym

no fun girl said:

I've heard that modern human chess has evolved to more resemble computer style play..

I've read several articles suggesting that human games of chess have indeed become longer, and more often end in draws due to increasingly defensive play styles.

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/24/a-data-driven-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-chess-match-lengths-and-outcomes/

This is just human vs human though.

If I had to hazard an uneducated series of guesses:

1. Humans are at the limit of their reasonably coherent heuristics, and have no choice but to fall back on conservative game-delaying draw-favoring strategies.

2. "Going for the draw" is far safer than going for a win, implying that Chess is flawed allowing many infinite loop / neverending game scenarios

3. Humans playing defensively hit on these draw loops despite the limitations of their heuristics primarily because they are so common.

I base this partly on the fact that modern chess requires surprisingly complex "draw" mechanics. See the ridiculous 50 move rule.

So, regarding AI vs human, I suspect that this defensive play style is coming out of human players analyzing modern AI vs AI games and incorporating their degenerate "billion moves forever rick and morty" strategies into their heuristics.

Matt

Apreche said:

Someone else suggested the same method I suggested on the show. Just take out the flash memory chip.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/one-fbis-major-claims-iphone-case-fraudulent

The thing is, their suggestion doesn't go far enough. Just copy all the data in all the phone's storage onto a desktop Mac. Then you can try to decrypt those bits directly, or even use the iOS emulator in XCode. You don't need the phone.

I thought about this when the news first broke, and I wonder if the computing problem is simply too intense? The encryption on those bits is INTENSE. It's SHA-1 encrypted three times. First with a unique key for every damn file on the phone, then wrapped up with a class key, of which the phone has several, and then lastly by a system key, which is a combination of the phone's password and UID. The latter is literally burned into the silicon and would take, I dunno, a fucking electron microscope to read? And at this point you are risking destroying everything because disassembling a packaged IC has a very high rate of failure. Maybe Apple or your phone service provider have a copy of this UID? Still a tough problem. Pure speculation based on the above, but could be a years-long brute force situation.

I suspect that the FBI, while dumb, knows they don't need this, and just want to set precedent while they have an emotional backing (San Bernardino shooting, terrorism). If there really was a national security threat, I'd bet money that NSA has Apple's OS signing key, but they do not want to reveal that fact, because they want to keep that shit for mega important operations, whereas the FBI wants iPhone decrypt priveledges for much lower-level stuff.

okeefe

Apreche said:

Someone else suggested the same method I suggested on the show. Just take out the flash memory chip.

That could work for this case because it's an older iPhone 5C.

Newer devices have the Secure Enclave which both enforces the delays for incorrect tries and mixes the passcode with its own embedded key. With that in play, you're in the realm of teasing apart silicon or attempting to sniff out crypto keys and whatnot from emanated EM—which might work, but also sounds much more expensive.

Starfox

okeefe said:

If it were already the case, then the request for GovtOS would be useless because there would be no way to apply it. As I understand it, there's a recovery mode that allows any signed update.

What exactly does the secure enclave do and not do, then? I thought they were asking for GovtOS because the particular iPhone in question was before Apple made fully armed and operational battle stations.

Apreche said:

Just copy all the data in all the phone's storage onto a desktop Mac. Then you can try to decrypt those bits directly

I think this would require magic AES-cracking skills.

okeefe

Starfox said:

okeefe said:

If it were already the case, then the request for GovtOS would be useless because there would be no way to apply it. As I understand it, there's a recovery mode that allows any signed update.

What exactly does the secure enclave do and not do, then? I thought they were asking for GovtOS because the particular iPhone in question was before Apple made fully armed and operational battle stations.

Apple's iOS Security Guide has an excellent summary of the Secure Enclave.

Right, this phone doesn't have an SE and, again, there's currently a loophole that you can force any signed iOS upgrade without first having to unlock the phone. That loophole is an oversight on Apple's part.

Matt

I thought Secure Enclave only touched parts of the phone that were linked to Apple Pay? It being a separate computer and all inside the phone solely to protect Apple's investment in their payment service.

SuperPichu

I really hope someone ports the Go AI to Go. The joke is right there. Waiting.

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee)

THE ROBOT WINS

Luke Burrage

gg

Apreche

Yassss!!

sK0pe

As far as getting the phone decrypted, you can do what Scott said / image the drive then brute force it without the risk of the phone defending itself via wiping itself.

Brute forcing a 4 digit unlock is simple. You would just need a script to image a new drive after every 10 tries. Trying to brute force the actual drive would be impossible without a few new algorithms and quantum computers.

zehaeva

If it didn't happen this time it'd happen next year, they're just progressing too fast. Damn was that a good game!